Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 40, 7 December 1905, Page 1

Current Topics

A Warning

We warn our readers against the wiles of sundry itinerant strangers who are endea\ oring 1 to dispose of a cheap and tawdry religious object ot a ' fancy' kind at a price far m excess ot its propei selling "value. Those who are wise will show such oily-tongued vendors, with-j out parley, to the door. Others, no doubt, will read our fnendly warning and then, like Poor Richard's friends, will act as if our words were never written. In this matter the old proverbial saying, 'Once bitten, twice shy,' seems to have little or no application. People who make sheep oi themselves will find plenty to shear them. And it is high time for New Zealand Catholics to cease placing themselves under the blades of every adventurer who sets out to fleece them by wheedling appeals to two of their finest sentimentslove of country and lo\c of faith As for us, we can only give good advice We cannot give i^ood sense But for those that are wise, a word ought to be sufficient.

Posthumous and Living Charity

Lavater, the physiognomist, sa\ s in his 'Aphorisms on Man,' that ' the manner of gnmg shows the character of the gi\er moie lhan the- gilt itself ' In the matter of cluuity, posthumous gnmg, especially when it is not the continuance or gtand finale of In ing giwng, oftentimes meals a ihaiattn that is nuseily towaids God and Ihe poor till the iela\ed iingei.s can grip Ihc hoaided gold no longei The Lord commended the man who made fnends v lth the shekels while his day ot life was still in its noon. Fuller couches the advantages oi li\ing owr posthumous chanty m quaint and happy phrase th.it looks like a tuple-tiered pnneib in ihyme : ' Sih er fiom the living Is gold in Ihe giving , Gold from the dying Is l)ii t si her a-flying ; Gold and sihei from the dead Tin u too otten into lead ' Throughout our country there arc so many good works that cry for aid— to-day ' For such the silver bestowed now 'is gold in the giving ' The bearing of these observations lies in the application

In France

We have logo back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for a penal code of such callous injustice as that which now disgraces the statute-hook of a country

whose official sign-board bears the words : ' Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.' Verily, France is in a -parlous state. ' O nation miserable ! With an untitled tyrant bloody-scepter'd, When shalt thou see thy wholesome days again ? ' There are prophets a-many who see amidst the gloom of persecution the morning star of the ' wholesome days ' that are to come. Cardinal Manning was one of the seen,. 'It would,' said he, 'be a good thing for the Catholic Church in France if it had not a centime from the Government ' So may it be ! For it seems as if the last grudging centime will soon be paid. But if the plundered Chinch in France were freed from the shackles oi State interference and control, she might enter with a light and happy heart upon her new career.

Charlatans

Some superstitions are like fashions. They have then bnef day, die, are buried six feet deep, and in due course aie exhumed again But the fortune-teller we ha\e always with us The Cumaean Sybil, the Roman augur and haiuspex, and (lie witches, wizards, and neclomanecrs of later date, all have their representatives in the class of usually wandering impostors who nowadays style themsehes variously fortune-tellers, futurists, psychomants, astio-mathematicians, and so on. And ha\e we not to-day the same old superstitions, under slightly alteied foims— the chiromancy and the cartomancy of the days of Merlin and Nostradamus, the good old ciystal spheic of Dr. Doe, and the magic mir101s and magic cucles of other times under new shapes, and a faith in dreams, as strong as that of Dr. Dee and Archbishop Laud .' Ages of flabby faith and religious mdiftcience ha\e evet been ages of rampant credulity So, m effect, did Lecky the rationalist write. And so it happens that out materialising age is, perhaps, par excellence, the age of superstition. Its agnosticism is dominated by ihe tyranny of the inascotte. And for the hie of us v c cannot see what difference in folly there is between those who long ago sought to wrest the secret of the future from the entrails of tows and the quacking of geese, and those who nowadays seek to read the decrees of the Almighty in the grounds of Bahia coffee and the turn of an ace of spades And on what giounds can a crystal-gazing statesman or coroneted society leader ot our day look down upon a Cicero sitting in the midst of the college of augurs, and closely observing— as an index of the l ut urc — the manner in which the sacred chickens pecked up the gram that was scattered among them ?

Some at least among the law-makers beyond the Tasman Sea have grown aweary of the wiles and frauds of the parasitic tribe who fatten upon the eagerness of our kind to pierce the veil that hides the future from our eyes. Judging by a paragraph in an Australian contemporary, there arc big possibilities of coming tribulation in Victoria for palmists, fortune-tellers, astro-mathematicians, and the rest of the strangelynamed tribe who ' Make fools believe in their foiesccing Of things before they arc in being, To swallow gudgeons ere they're catched, And count their chickens ere they're hatched. . . But still the best for him that gives The best price for ! t, or best believes.' 1 A Bill is being introduced,' says our contemporary, 1 into the Victorian State Parliament, which provides that the offender shall be liable to a fine of £100, or to twelve months' imprisonment.' Penalties of such severity would probably defeat their own purpose. But something effective should nevertheless be done to protect the public from this class of fraud, and to deter the secular press from being—as 1 it has long been— the sounding-board of this school of cheats and charlatans. Some of the papers that we wot of publish from time to time articles from sciolist quackheads and callow theorists, denouncing as superstitious the deepest things of true science and faith and philosophy. Some of their theories— which they mistake for the proven findings of science — would cut away the basis of all religion and morality and social order. But side by side with this far-resounding; clash of shallow fallacy and German-gilt falsehood, the daily papers print the vulgar and clamorous advertisements of the futurist, the astro-mathematician, and the clairvoyant. They pocket the impostors' fees (generally prepaid, as a matter of precaution), and help them to fleece a public that is in great part .superstitious. Without the aid of the newspaper pies-s, the ranks of the soothsayers would b^ speedily thinned. The press— the boast of our century— is their chief ally, and the principal means of propagating this form of superstition and chicanery.

The Clothes of Religion

The Bible-in-schools leaders are lightning-change artists—somewhat after the style of the late Fred Maccabe and Charles Duval, but far loss entertaining in their antics. Within the past six months they ha\e shed their stage costume several times. Their latest bow to a New Zealand audience was made m 'an emasculated caricature ' of the Protestant version of the Bible, to heused as a mere literary text-book, with the ci si while indispensable ' ethical explanations ' carefully docked, and the hacked and mutilated Sacred Text used as a peg on which to hang up instructions in grammar and geography. The good men propose to 'destroy all reverence for Christianity— by cutting out its most sacred Mysteries and throwing thorn o\er the fence ; for Religion, by reducing it to a more empty and sentimental philosophy ; for the Bible, by placing it on a par with 1 Robinson Crusoe ' or tho Fifth Reader, or, at best, with profane writings such as the plays of Shakespeare or the poems of Tennyson. They degrade the Bible in the eyes of children by loading them to bohe\e that its chief use and function is to teach geography and grammar, and that it is to be road without any attempt at a real explanation oi understanding of its contents, which is impossible without entering upon the domain of religion. So far as their proposals go, they would give the children in the schools, not Iho nourishing bread of faith, but the haul, diy stone of scepticism, and a creed which would bo too meagre and foggy to satisfy even a Tom Paine or a Jean Jacques Rousseau. Now, religion is no mere sentiment. Its essence is belief and trust. These, and the foundation

facts and realities which call them forth, form no part of the procession of shifting schemes that are evolved in the brain of the Biblc-in-schools League. The essence of religion they throw aside. The fantastic Thing which they set up in its place, they drape with the clothes of religion : they cling to phrases ; they prescribe emotions ; they even insist upon a ritual formula. But they forget that, without the positive and definitive religious teaching that is back of the formula, it is as unmeaning as Mr Harrison's appeal to the Unknowable. Wilfrid ,Ward, in one ol his writings, gets the rawhide around the shoulders of those Positivists who, like the authors of the latest Bible-in-schools scheme, reject the realities of religion and retain its clothes. 'It would,' said he, 'be more becoming in them to bury it, clothes and all, and give forth a sigh over its grave, as Schopenhauer did, than to keep its clothes as perquisites wherewith to array their own children. The former is, at all events, the ordinary procedure of civilised warfare ; the latter is rather suggestive of the hangman.'

Schools : A Contrast

In a work of his on liberty of teaching, published in 1865, Isaac Butt laid down this golden maxim of statecraft : ' Institutions are made for the people, not the people for institutions.' English Conservative newspapers, like Russell Lowell's pious editor, believe in the application of this principle 'ez far away ez Paris is '—in Sweden and Poland and Bulgaria and Macedonia. But they get a fit of the megrims at the thought of getting it into operation in their own little Poland — to wit, in holy Ireland, where the grass grows green. This is particularly the case with the so-called ' National ' system of education, which, like its predecessors of more unsavory memory, was originally devised for the purpose of de-nationalising the rising generation, weaning them! from the faith of their fathers, and turning them into West Britons with a patois of thickened d's. Mere is a hymn that the little budding Irish boys and guls were required to recite day by day, beginning with 1838 :— ' I thank the goodness and tke grace That on my birth have smiled, And made me in these Christian days A happy English child.' The little Mauryas and Paudngs of those days were (says Dr. O'Riordan) ' brought up under un-Catholic influences, and were trained to think of Ireland as a western province of England, with no more national indi\iduahty than an English shire.' But the system broke down, and in 1858, in the British House of Lords, its creator sorrowfully tar-branded it with the word ' Failuie.' From that day to the present, the miscalled 'National ' system of education in Ireland has been one of wooden-headed muddling and scholastic quackery, in which the principle of adaptation to t-he traditions, needs, and aspirations of the country has had no part ' I hope,' said the scholarly Rector of the .'lrish College, Rome, im a recent farewell speech in Ireland, ' we will keep insisting that Ireland is not England, and that the educational virtues which are thought best for England are not for that mere reason to be adapted for Ireland, and that the Irish people will refuse to put on the educational cast-ofTs which some of our educationalists bring across the Channel. If we are to judge from the action of some of our experts, the best recommendation we can have that a certain educational garment should become us for wear is that it has been measured for the back of Great Britain and proved a misfit.' Ruskin has said somewhere that the man who expresses a good thought in clear and pithy speech deserves better of his] kind than he who makes two blades of grass spring up where only one had grown before. Dr. O'Riordan's neat 1 si7ing-up ' of the blundering methods of the Irish Education Department is one of those happy epigrammatic sayings that are likely to endure and work.

For neatness, cleanliness, excellence of repair, and efficiency of instruction, the Irish convent schools are a healthy and pleasant contrast to the so-called 'National' schools that are vested in the Commissioners. So, in effect, wrote Inspector F. H. Dale, of the English Board of Education, in his Report on Primary Education in Ireland. 'It is noteworthy,' said he, ' that tho 292 convent schools paid on the English system by a lump sum fromi the State, for the proper distribution of which the community conducting tho schools is primarily responsible, are at once the least expensive to the State, and among the most efficient and best-managed schools in Ireland. The average cost of maintenance to the State per child in average attendance at these schools was only £1 17s ll£d., as against £2 8s 5d in the ordinary National schools ; yet they are far better furnished and provided with a more adequate staff than the ordinary schools. I have already had occasion to comment on the admirable cleanliness and neatness of the premises and the excellence of the equipment ; but these are only a few among the many advantages of the careful supervision and management which are the indispensable conditions of the success of our elementary school. I was impressed in every convent school that I visited, by the knowledge and interest shown by the conductors, even when not actually teaching in the school, with regard to all the details of the school-work and organisation, and by their readiness to consider, and, if possible, to adopt any changes in the curriculum or organisation which the Central Office might consider would render their schools more efficient.'